Pay Attention
by froodlemonkey
Summary: My name is Harley Holmes. Ten years ago, my big brother Simon and his friend Marshall Teller disappeared. The only person who has any answers is a guy with grey hair that the Mayor is keeping prisoner. Tonight, I'm breaking him out and then I'm going to find my brother and bring him home. And nobody is going to stop me."
1. Chapter 1

"Pay attention, Harley; you could learn something."

Once, when Harley was five and it wasn't his birthday, Simon had come home with his backpack full of brand-new books just for him. There were fairy tales, and nursery rhymes, and adventure stories, and there were pictures, huge and brightly coloured and not scribbled on by anyone but Harley. Simon had sat on Harley's small bed, back against the wall, and Harley had leant against his brother's chest, basking in the new-book smell while Simon read to him, Simon's chin resting on top of Harley's head, the index finger of his right hand tracing the words while his left turned the pages. The only sound in the world was Simon's voice, and the thick, clean noise of the heavy pages being turned over.

"Pay attention, Harley; you could learn something."

When Harley was six, the boy next door had almost tricked him into eating a lizard. Simon had stopped him in time, and somehow the lizard had ended up in the pants of the boy who lived next door. He had screamed and rolled around and taken off his pants, and Harley and Simon had laughed and laughed. Later, when Simon tucked him into bed, he had asked what a lizard felt like.

"Like... this!" Simon had cried, and tickled Harley mercilessly, until he squirmed and shrieked with delight, finally wriggling free to throw his arms around Simon's neck and shouting that he loved him best, best of all, more than even all the lizards in the world.

"Pay attention, Harley; you could learn something."

When Harley was seven, his brother took him trick or treating. A lawn decoration shaped like a mummy had terrified him for reasons he couldn't explain, and he had clung to Simon, sobbing and gasping that the bandaged figure wanted to take his place, that he was sorry, that he wanted to come home. Simon held him, and kissed his tear-stained cheek, and took him home, and that night told him a story about a very cross and bumbling mummy who ate something he shouldn't have and now spent eternity slowly shuffling in search of a bathroom.

"Pay attention, Harley; you could learn something."

When Harley was eight, his brother and the boy next door walked out into the night, and never came back. Then the police came, and the grown-ups from next door, their eyes red from weeping, and the people with video cameras and microphones, and all of them asked the same questions, over and over and over again:

Where were they? What had happened to them? Why didnt they come back?

Harley had retreated to his bedroom and sat on the stained, worn carpet, staring at his bookshelves. He didn't need to ask any questions; he already knew the answers. Like two children in a fairy tale, Simon and the boy next door had lost their way in the dark, strayed from the path, and the darkness had eaten them up.

"Pay attention, Harley; you could learn something."

Harley pondered his precious books. They were older now, well-loved in the way of a small child, and the new-book smell was long gone. Their pages were crumpled, and some of them were sticky with spilled grape juice, and there were tears in the dust jackets that Simon had repaired with sticking tape. But inside, the stories were still the same. Inside, there were monsters; cruel witches, vicious wolves, hungry ghosts. Inside, there were victims; lost chldren and little old ladies and helpless princesses who rotted away in glass coffins for want of a prince. And inside, there were heroes; bold knights and friendly dragons and kindly wizards.

"Pay attention, Harley; you could learn something."

Harley plucks anxiously at his fingers, knuckles his suddenly stinging eyes. Simon, he thinks helplessly. I'm not smart like you, and I'm only eight; how am I supposed to know if the books are a warning to stay clear, or a how-to guide for getting you back?


	2. Chapter 2

"Pay attention, Harley; you could learn something."

So, Harley pays attention.

There's a girl five blocks over who, if you look at her one way, is a girl in flower-patterned dresses with a ribbon in her hair, but changed, if you looked another way, into a boy in a black leather jacket riding a skateboard. And he was always riding a skateboard, no matter where you saw him, even if he was sitting quite still on a bench, he was always, somehow, also riding a skateboard. Sometimes Harley can see both, sort of overlapping and merging into each other, but it makes his eyes ache to watch for too long when they do that.

There's a small white poodle who visits every dog-owning household in Eerie on a nightly basis, getting her comrades ready for a war that never seems to come.

There's a group of men on motorcycles who, twice a year, fight a bloody hour-long battle with monsters wearing garbage men suits.

There's a black cat who hangs out in the Eerie cemetary sometimes. One time, at the height of summer, Harley found him sleeping in a patch of sunlight, but when he reached out to pet him, the cat jumped up with a startled hiss and told him to get lost in a rough, gravelly voice. After that, they just nod at each other when their paths cross. Cat business is rarely boy business, and Harley has enough on his plate.

Under City Hall, there's a prison, except sometimes there isn't. When it's there, someone with grey hair like an old man and the unlined face of a boy in his early teens will scream threats and obscenities to figures in the shadows. Sometimes he just screams. Once, Harley heard him crying, and the sound frightened him so much that he ran all the way home, and vomited 'til his head ached in the safety behind his locked bathroom door.

And one night, standing in the middle of Front Street, there's Sara Sue.

Harley had never seen her before, but he recognises her from Simon's stories. She had a magical pencil that could bring anything to life, or hide anything away, and she had gone to France because she wanted a new mom and her real family were fishes.

"Couldn't she have made us a new mom?" he had asked his brother, the first time he heard the tale. Simon's arm, warm and familiar around his belly, had tightened reflexively, squeezing Harley so tightly that he wriggled and protested.

"Sorry," said Simon, loosening his grip. "But no. She couldn't have given us a new mom. You see, nothing made by the magic pencil was real, in the end."

"Reality is stupid," Harley had snorted, and Simon had laughed and blown raspberries on his stomach.

Now, here she was. He can tell straight away that the face she's wearing isn't her own, that it's something she's drawn on to try and force her way into some new life far away, but she's wearing a beret and the worn stub of an Eerie Number 2 pencil dangles from a piece of string around her neck, so he knows it's her.

Harley is older now, and he has been paying attention for a long, long time. Long enough to know that a heroic quest doesn't have a hope of succeeding unless the hero has a band of trusty companions to help him out along the way. And so, he walks up to Sara Sue, looks past her false face into the sad brown eyes of a girl who vanished thirteen years ago, chasing stories of her own, and introduces himself.

"My name is Harley Holmes. Ten years ago, my big brother Simon and his friend Marshall Teller disappeared. The only person who has any answers is a guy with grey hair that the Mayor is keeping prisoner. Tonight, I'm breaking him out and then I'm going to find my brother and bring him home.

And nobody is going to stop me."


	3. Chapter 3

Sara Sue has been a hero and a villain. She has raised peasants to kinghood and trampled nations beneath her feet, birthed thousands and then killed them, just to see how it felt. In a forest glade, she danced naked in the moonlight, and when she stubbed her bare toe on a jagged stone, tore the entire forest to pieces out of rage.

Over and over again, she has attempted to draw her mother to her. Over and over again, women wearing Marilyn Teller's face have held her, stroked her hair, told her she is good and clever and beautiful and perfect, promised her everything in the world. She burned them all, sooner or later.

The Eerie Number 2 pencil had worn quickly to almost nothing, in those first few months spent hunting her new mother through the streets of Paris. Now barely an inch remains, and she keeps it close to her, always. Like Dumbo's feather, she knows it holds no power of it's own, but she's reluctant to fly without it, just in case.

Sara Sue has been worshipped as a god and reviled as a devil, and none of it, not a single moment, was real. So she came back to Eerie, because as miserable as life here had been, it had still been hers, and besides, there was a reason so many of the screaming, fleeing paper peasants resembled her father and brothers. Then a teenage boy, with dirty blond hair and the slightly pinched look of someone whose childhood had been one long stretch of not getting enough to eat, had walked up to her on the street, and told her he needed her for his mission.

And Sara Sue, who has taken a hundred heroes on a hundred journeys, and not once been surprised by anything that happened, is shocked into silence.

"I have gone mad," she thought, not particularly shocked. "And now I cannot tell if this is real, or just another story I am telling myself." But she takes his hand in hers, and feels for the stump of pencil around her neck. If she wakes tomorrow in the laundry room of her father's house, she will have a dream to cling to while she washes the floors and makes sandwiches.

The garbage men spot them while she is lurking at the mouth of an alley, trying to draw the exterior of City Hall. Harley pulls at her arm, whispering to her that they need to hide, and quickly, but Sara Sue shrugs him off, scrawls a hasty signature on the bottom of the page, and rips her sketch in two.

City Hall explodes outwards, the pseudo-Greek columns and marble fascia reduced in an instant to powder and rubble. Harley lets out a barely audible "Holy Corn", and Sara Sue smiles, remembering when his brother was similarly awed by her talents.

Now the insides of City Hall are exposed, and Sara Sue nearly drops her pencils in shock, because instead of raw brickwork and damaged pipes, she can see red, wet meat, pulsating organs and gleaming white bone. The smell coming from the wounded structure makes her head spin, and then, it begins to scream.

Garbage men swarm towards them, and when the first one reaches out to touch her, Sara Sue plunges her pencil, point-first, through his sunglasses and into his eye. The mirrored lens cracks and shatters, the wood and graphite tip pierces the soft jelly beneath, and as the garbage man shrieks in fear and rage and agony, Sara Sue sets her legs apart and pushes forward and down, forcing him to the ground, and brings all her weight to bear as she forces the pencil into his brain. His screams get higher and more frantic the deeper she goes, and when the pencil hits the back of his skull and snaps under the strain, he spasms and falls silent.

When she looks up, the garbage men have gathered before her, blocking the alleyway completely, silent and watchful and keeping a safe distance.

Sara Sue wishes she had been a baton twirler in her school's marching band. She would like to pull two more pencils from her figure-enhancing utility belt with a flourish, spin them around on the tips of her fingers, then snatch them from mid-air to strike a dramatic pose and say something witty to her enemies before charging them. Instead, she fumbles a biro from her jeans pocket, scribbles a hasty cartoon version of a .50mm machine gun on the inside of her forearm, then drops to the ground atop the dead garbage man and reduces all his co-workers to a red, white and grey pulp that will stain the Eerie sidewalks for years to come.

When she's done, she wipes her arm clean with spit and the palm of her other hand, and turns to see Harley staring at her, white-faced and trembling.

Sara Sue has been both a hero and a villain, and what she has learned, if she learned anything at all, was that if you wanted to have any fun with it, you go big or go home.

Well, she's home now. And tonight, she feels like going big.


	4. Chapter 4

They ride through City Hall on the back of a dinosaur. It's hastily drawn, a little vague around the edges, and Harley is fairly sure that real dinosaurs didn't carry nunchucks, or at least if they did, they certainly didn't use them so well.

Still, as garbage men go flying in all directions, and the massive reptile sings a song to itself about how much it likes to stomp and roar, because it is, after all, just a dinosaur, Harley can't deny that it's very, very effective.

"His name is Scribbles," says Sara Sue, laying one hand tenderly on the massive lead-grey neck and beaming with pride. At her touch, or the sound of his name, Scribbles roars in delight and does a little capering dance, trampling garbage men into paste beneath his massive, semi-translucent feet.

The entrance to the underground levels of City Hall is a gullet, ringed with rows and rows of lamprey-like teeth, and bone stairs slicked with blood leading away into the darkness. On the way down, Scribbles loses his footing and in order to regain his balance, he drops his nunchucks and claws at the walls for support. The entire tunnel shudders and quakes and the screams, which had faded to an irritating background noise, return full-force.

The bars of Dash's cell are made of blood and bone and wire, and Scribbles shoves his huge blunt nose between them, wriggles, and pulls away wearing the entire front wall as a necklace. He shakes his head to free himself and Harley and Sara Sue slip off his back before he accidently dislodges them.

On the ground, Harley sees, and feels his gorge rise. Beside him, Sara Sue hisses in sympathy, and her hand tightens on his own.

There are cables grafted to the back of his hands. The skin around them is torn and bruised, and they have been in place so long that his flesh has tried to heal around and over them. Sparking wires hiss and fizz in the slow ooze of blood that seeps around the junction between boy and machine, and the air smells of cooking meat.

Harley never met Dash X before his big brother walked out of the story they shared and into a new one that Harley has never read, and may never learn the ending to. But he knows that beneath the obscene mix of copper wiring and coppery blood, there is a plus symbol and a minus symbol, and he has a sudden, sick realisation as to how exactly the enormous crouching monster that is City Hall has been given life.

Simon had always been vehemently anti-gun, but he also became decidedly pro-scissors after his earliest adventures with Marshall Teller. When Harley uses a pair of gardening sheers to sever the cables between the boy they take life from and the building they channel it into, Dash screams so long and loud that Harley thinks for a moment that he has killed him, and all the answers he wanted along with him.

Then Dash gets to his feet, shakey and pale, picks up a three foot bone shard from the debris underfoot, and slams it viciously against the nearest wall of living tissue until the bone shatters in his bleeding hands. When he's done, he turns and looks at them, and they stare back, unsure of what to say.

"We should get out of here," he croaks. Scribbles leans forward and licks his face with a tongue as soft as crumpled tissues, and Dash stumbles backwards and looks, for a moment, like he might cry. Instead, he scrubs angrily at his face with the torn and dirty sleeve of his trenchcoat, and lets them help him onto the dinosaur's back.

Outside, he blinks in the neon glare of the streetlights, and stares openmouthed at the carnage in front of him. Scribbles picks up a garbage man's severed leg and chews it thoughtfully, while Sara Sue rubs the sensitive place behind his left ear and whispers about what a good boy he is.

Dash looks at Harley, eyes narrowing as he tries to place him. Eventually, he shakes his head in disgust and simply asks what his deal is.

Harley knows this part of his story by heart, has gone over it a thousand times, could recite it right here, ankle-deep in blood and bone. Instead, he pulls out a cheap black and white composition book, a decade old and fragile with constant re-readings, and passes it to the kid with the grey hair.

He'd found it when he was nine, huddled under Simon's old bed, hiding from one of his father's drunken rages. It was tucked between the mattress and the bedframe, and it had been waiting for him all that time.

Marshall's record of events had been addressed to "whom it may concern." Simon's version simply said, "Harley."


	5. Chapter 5

"He said that if anything happened to him, I should go to Marshall, and that if he wasn't around, I should come to you," said Harley, when Dash had finished reading. "But Marshall went away when he did, and by the time I found this and came looking, you were gone too."

Dash's hands were freshly wrapped in thick white bandages, and spots of blood had already begun to show through. Still, they were steady as he held a plastic cup of instant hot chocolate to his mouth, taking slow, careful sips.

They were in the Unkind One's clubhouse, a low wooden building that existed in the lost time between Sunday afternoon and Sunday evening, when people would go from relaxing on their much-longed-for weekend to suddenly scrambling to iron their clothes ready for Monday morning. They sat in a booth upholstered in soft black leather; Harley directly across from Dash, Sara Sue at his side, and Scribbles neatly folded away in her back pocket. At the tables around them, Billy Millions and his men sat, and watched, and listened.

"It was a long time ago," said Dash. "There were rumours about something living in the lake. The pirates had gone away, and the mermaids were terrified. But when we got there, the mermaids were already dead. Just... pieces of them, really, floating in the water like chum." He took a deep breath, released it slowly. "I was for bailing, right there and then, but your brother said we should check for survivors and Tell- Marshall, I mean - he could never leave off poking at things he didn't understand."

"Simon saved a lizard from me, once," said Harley, smiling at the memory. "He never liked to see an animal hurt."

Dash snorted. "He wanted to get a vet for a werewolf who tried to eat him," he said.

"He said putting my family in a fishbowl was unfair to my fish," said Sara Sue. "He was right."

"He was a good kid," said Dash. "Really, I mean that. I liked him, in a weird 'what are you doing?' kind of way."

There was a murmur of agreement from the assembled Unkind Ones, then Dash went on with his story.

"Anyway, all of a sudden, there's this bright light in the water, sort of... dancing, I guess? Under the surface. And it was like we couldn't look away from it, even as it got closer and bigger and brighter. By the time it made landfall, we couldn't even move, and it just," Dash paused, opening and closing his fists reflexively, though Harley couldn't even imagine how much the gesture was hurting him. "It enveloped us. I don't know how else to say it. It was like dissolving into a thousand pieces of light and being scattered across the universe while being compressed into the smallest, purest core of yourself that could ever exist, all at the same time." He swallowed and looked away. "Then it screamed and trashed and spat me out. I landed in a copse of gorse bushes at the edge of the water, and when I came to, the light was gone, and so were they." He stared at his hands, his grey fringe falling across his face and hiding his eyes. "I looked for them, I did. But they were gone, and all I could think was, 'It happened again. I didn't get invited again.'" He laughed bitterly. "Pretty pathetic, right?"

"No," said Harley, and Sara Sue shook her head.

Dash pretended to be interested in the view from the window, avoiding their gaze. His fingernails plucked at the padding and gauze covering the palms of his hands, as if he'd like to gouge holes in them to match the wounds on the other side.

"After that, I went back to the mill. I thought maybe I'd go find the Tellers, let them know what happened." He looked at Harley. "I didn't know Simon had a little brother. If I had, I would have tried to tell you."

"It's okay," said Harley, but Dash shook his head.

"No, it isn't. I ran around with those kids for nearly two years, and I didn't let Teller's mom know what happened to her kid because Mayor fucking Chisel found me first and promised to help me find my own parents if I kept quiet about it. He offered me a deal, and I took it." He started to cry in earnest then, ugly rasping sobs that tore at his throat and made his whole body shake.

Sara Sue looks like she wants to cry too, and her grip on Harley's hand becomes almost painful beneath the table. Harley raises their joined hands up into the light, and places his free hand gently on Dash's forearm. Paper napkins fold themselves into tiny origami animals and gather around the three of them.

"You did the best you remembered how to," he says. "If any of it was ever even a tiny bit your fault, you paid for it a million times over in that cell."

They sit there in silence, and Billy Millions brings them burgers and fries, and ushes his men out of the room as the sun begins to rise.


	6. Chapter 6

Billy Millions was doing the dishes when Harley came in. He picked up a dish towel and began drying the stack of plates that were accumulating on the draining board.

"You're going after them," said Billy Millions. It wasn't a question, but Harley nodded anyway.

"This all started at the lake," he said. "That's where I'm headed now. I just wanted to say thank you before I left."

Billy laughed his strange, abrupt laugh, pulling off his bright yellow rubber gloves as he did so.

"We should be thanking you," he said. "Or that girl of yours, anyway. For nearly seventy years, the Unkind Ones have fought and died to protect this town, and in a single night you kids did more to hurt them than we've managed this whole time."

"They'll be back, though," said Harley. "Lower-level baddies like that, there's always more of them."

"Of course," said Billy. "And we'll be there to fight them. Entry-level enemies respawning is how you know there's a bigger threat out there that needs to be taken care of. Besides, if the lackeys don't ooze back together and start attacking innocent townsfolk again, what will the supporting characters have to do while the hero of the story goes on his quest to find and eliminate the real villian?"

Harley flushed. "I didn't mean..." he began, but Billy Millions held up one hand and shook his head, smiling.

"Son, my family started this gang in 1935," he said. "I've known since I was a boy that my job would be to watch my father lead his men against the forces that threatened Eerie, and to see him die doing it, and then to repeat the whole tale over again with men, and a kid, of my own." His smile became a little wistful. "So you see, I can tell when someone's following a tale that's only half-told, because I'm in one myself."

Harley put down the plate he was holding, and stared at his hands.

"Sometimes, I feel like I'm two people," he said. "Like that girl with the corpse-heart in the fairytale. Like I had my story, but now I'm also living Simon's, right alongside it and woven all through mine." He looked at Billy Millions' kindly, bearded face. "I think the story wanted him, but it got me instead."

Billy put one large hand on his shoulder and pulled him into a warm hug that smelled of leather and motor-oil.

"We don't always get to pick the kind of story we're in," he said. "Sometimes it starts with an enchanted typewriter or cursed script pages. Sometimes it's a fairytale, and you don't know 'til the end if it's pre- or post-Disney." He pulled away, holding Harley at arms length and looking him in the eye. "But I think your brother would be proud of you, and I know he'd want you to be happy, so if you walk away right now, nobody would blame you."

"That's a test," said Harley. "You're not a real hero until you have a chance to back down and you turn it down."

Billy shook his head. "You are one genre-savvy kid," he said admiringly. "And now, since your girlfriend already has her magic pencil, and your pal with the grey hair has his marks, I think it's high time you got your Object of Significance, don't you?" He pulled a key from the pocket of his leather vest. A Harley Davidson keyfob dangled from it.

"I can't ride a motorcycle," said Harley.

Billy grinned so broadly that his gold teeth glinted in the flourescent light of the clubhouse kitchen.

"This isn't your standard ignition key," he said. "And what it starts? That's no motorcycle."


	7. Chapter 7

Lake Eerie's once-thriving population of rum-swilling, potty-mouthed mermaids is long gone. Instead, as he approaches the shore, an enormous black sea serpent rears up out of the choppy waves and stares down at them from under a crown of purple seaweed. It's eyes are huge and luminous and when it speaks, it fouls the air about it with the stink of rotting fish.

"I was expecting you yesterday," it said peevishly.

"I was delayed," Mayor Chisel responded, his voice strangled and nasal, taking shallow breaths through his mouth in a futile effort to combat the stench.

"So I heard," said the serpent. "The jackalopes and the ravens are all talking about it, laughing to themselves in their nests and burrows, how a magic pencil and a boy with his head half in storybooks slew the Behemoth that served the King of Eerie."

"Mayor," said Chisel. "This is America. We don't have kings."

"And now they've destroyed the source of your power, and stolen away the source of that source's power, and here you are."

"Here I am," agreed Chisel. "I've come for the Lost Light."

The giant serpent made a contemptuous noise in the back of it's long, long throat, and bits of fish flew into the air in a glittering, reeking stream.

"You know what you ask isn't possible," it said. "The Lost Light isn't a dog you can whistle up to help you find some wandering sheep."

"It comes when it's called," said Chisel. "Like a dog. Like any well-trained pet. You just need to know how to draw it in."

"The last time, it took the blood of a colony of merfolk to summon it," said the serpent. "Jackalopes and Bigfoots and a werewolf with a limp won't be enough."

"I know," said Chisel. If he sounded regretful, it was only years of political training kicking in.

The serpent's eyes widened in shock and fear and the stunned disbelief of an immortal creature who knows, suddenly and with certainty, that it is going to die.

"You can't!" it said. "We had a deal!"

"Deal's off," said Chisel, and with a gesture, summoned the ghost of Old Bob from where he had lain sleeping on the bottom of Lake Eerie, dreaming of vengence amid the shattered remains of a Windmaster Trailer.

The serpent, who had found itself trapped in Lake Eerie a hundred years ago when it chased a ghost ship through a portal and then gotten stuck, made a striking lunge at Mayor Chisel, who stepped back far enough to avoid lake water damaging his expensive shoes. It hissed and spat steaming poison that turned the sand to glass, but Old Bob sucked it down like black spaghetti and ground it to a sticky red paste, as though he were a food processor with a speed stuck permenently between whip and frappe.

Old Bob roared in fury when the Mayor banished him back to the lake bed, but Chisel had decades of appeasement rituals on his side, and a tornado, unlike a politician, always honours the agreements it makes.

Mayor Chisel waited as the red waters of Lake Eerie faded to pink and, eventually, to it's normal washed-out grey. He waited as night fell and the moon rose, and it's reflection in the black water spread and grew bright, and the Lost Light whirled and skipped and spun it's way to the surface, dancing excitedly across the lake and towards the shore, only to pull up short and draw in on itself when it realised what was waiting for it.

"Come. Here." said the Mayor of Eerie, and the Lost Light slunk low and flinching onto the poisoned shore where the serpent had made it's final stand. It's shape was amorphous but the way it moved resembled nothing so much as a beaten dog with it's ears laid back in anticipation of another blow.

When Chisel stepped into it, the bright glow diminished around him, and as he walked deeper into that radiant light, wisps of blackness peeled away from him and spread through the luminous shape, making it dull and grey where he had passed.

In the copse of gorse on the opposite side of the lake, Dash and Sara Sue realise too late that Harley has left the flimsy shelter of their hiding place, and is running towards the fading figure of the Mayor. Dash kicks off his heavy boots, and runs barefoot on the loose, shifting sandy, but Harley is too far ahead. The only drawing Sara Sue has on her is Scribbles, and using a ninja dinosaur this close to him is bound to catch Chisel's attention, mid-eldritch ritual or not. In the dark, she whispers a prayer to any benevolent deity that might be paying attention, and uses her forefinger to draw a tree-root in the sand. She doesn't see Harley go sprawling, but Dash's hair is a beacon in the night and she sees him skid to a stop and kneel on something that struggles and kicks, a blacker shape against the near-black sky.

When she catches up to them, Dash is bleeding from a bite on his forearm, and very, very quietly giving Harley the benefit of his broad and pretty profane vocabulary. The Lost Light is barely a glimmering in the water now, and it could almost have been the reflected moon, if the moon had convulsed and writhed like a poisoned animal above them.

She sits cross-legged next to them, pulls out a pencil and, in the murk of an Eerie midnight, doodles a quick sketch on the back of her notepad. Even under the poor conditions, it's recognisably Harley, with a speech bubble emerging from his mouth. Her handwriting is a lot worse than her drawing, but when she throws the notepad at him, he can clearly read the legend "I'M A FUCKING IDIOT".

"What were you thinking?" she hisses.

"I was thinking, I'll follow him and make him tell me where Simon is!" Harley hisses back.

"Because you can intimidate a grown man where tornadoes and sea snakes and glowing lake monsters that may also be portals to another world can't?"

"But he has to tell me!" said Harley.

Dash rolled his eyes. "She's right," he said. "You are a fucking idiot."

Harley gritted his teeth. "You wouldn't understand," he said. "Neither of you. You," he jabs his finger at Sara Sue, "hate your family and wouldn't care if they vanished forever, and you," he turns his gaze to Dash, "don't even have a family to go missing in the first place."

There's a shocked silence after that, and it seems to go on for a long time.

Finally, Sara Sue says, almost too quietly to be heard, "That was really mean, Harley."

"I know," says Harley. "I'm sorry."

"I'm bleeding," says Dash. "I can't believe you bit me. I think it's going to scar."

"It will," says Harley, who used to know about these things, back when he still had a big brother to leave teethmarks on. He's bone-tired now, worn down by adrenaline and fear and hope and by ten long years of waiting for his greatest adventure to start, only to find himself woefully unprepared when it finally did.

He tugs at the leather thong around his neck, pulls the Harley Davidson keyfob out from under his sweater and examines the key that dangles from it. It's old, made of some heavy dark-coloured metal that stays cold against his skin no matter how long he wears it, and there's a crest or a seal or something stamped into bow. A jackalope and a Bigfoot rear up either side of an ornate shield divided into four sections, and the whole design is topped with a sort of crown made from ears of corn, berries and holly leaves.

"What is it?" he'd asked Billy Millions, stood over the sink in the Unkind One's kitchen, smelling fried onions and fresh coffee and the ever-present tang of petrol.

"It's a City Key," said Billy Millions. "It's the City Key, in fact; the only one ever made for Eerie. You can open any door, any lock, even create one, as long as you're within the city limits and you know where you want to be."

"How..." Harley couldn't think of a polite way to phrase the question he wants to ask, so he just asked it. "How come you have it?"

Billy Millions shrugged, and grinned. "The Mayor somehow managed to misplace it," he said. "A real shame, that sort of carelessness from an elected official. It was entrusted to my great-grandfather by a charming aviatrix who was very concerned about such a sensitive item potentially falling into the wrong hands."

Harley had looked at the key, and his own pale, bony hands alongside Billy Million's large, hairy ones, the knuckles scarred and engine oil ingrained around the fingernails.

"I don't think I should have this," he said.

"I think you're exactly the person to have it," said Billy Millions. "Artifacts like this have a way of... seeking out the people who are meant to use them."

Later, when they had taken leave of the Unkind Ones, he had told Dash and Sara Sue that he needed to check in with his parents, and he'd meet up with them later by the giant wooden wheel outside the World o' Stuff.

In fact, his parents were out, or maybe just passed out, and he'd hurried to Simon's old bedroom, to the closet door that hadn't shut properly since Harley had filled the lock with expanding foam at the tender age of six, and clenching the key tightly in one hand, wished as hard as he could to see Simon again.

The key had slid into the lock, and turned, and when he opened it, there was Simon at nine years old. He stood with his back to Harley, raising his hands in a shower of falling twenty dollar bills and laughing, and Harley can see through him to the garment-bagged winter coats behind. He had shut the closet door quietly and gone back to his own room, and when he showed up at the World o' Stuff two hours later, neither Dash nor Sara Sue asked where he'd been, or why his eyes were swollen and red.

Here and now, on the cold sand, Sara Sue bumps him with her shoulder.

"I'm sorry I called you a fucking idiot," she says,

"I'm not," says Dash.

"I'm sorry I bit you anyway," Harley tells him, then turns to Sara Sue. "And I'm sorry I said that about your family."

"I do kind of hate them," she says with a shrug.

"It was still a horrible thing to say," says Harley.

"It's kind of a horrible thing to feel," says Sara Sue, and Harley nods, because at his core, he kind of hates his parents, and sometimes wonders if he would be so desperate to find his big brother if this wasn't the case.

Dash rolls his eyes.

"Well, this is getting maudlin," he says, standing up. "What's next? I don't think we're getting anything out of that sea serpent, not now it's been turned into the world's biggest protein shake."

There's a hoarse croak from behind them, and they turn to see the biggest raven Harley has ever laid eyes on, watching them from a branch.

"You bring me that sea serpent's eyeball," it says. "And I'll tell you everything you need to know about the Lost Light, and Mayor Chisel, and what happened here ten years ago."


End file.
